[1219] There is a portrait of Clavigero in Cumplido’s edition of Prescott’s Mexico (1846), vol. iii.
[1220] Voyageurs, iii. 422.
[1221] Mr. H. H. Bancroft (Mexico, vol. i, p. 7, note), however, charges his predecessor with parading his acquisition of this then unprinted material, and with neglecting the more trustworthy and more accessible chroniclers. He also speaks (Mexico, i. 701) of an amiable weakness in Prescott which sacrificed truth to effect, and to a style which he calls “magnificent,” and to a “philosophic flow of thought,”—the latter trait in Prescott being one of his weakest; nor is his style what rhetoricians would call “magnificent.”
[1222] Mr. R. A. Wilson makes more of it than is warranted, in affirming that “Prescott’s inability to make a personal research” deprives us of the advantage of his integrity and personal character (New Conquest of Mexico, p. 312).
[1223] Ticknor’s Prescott, quarto edition, pp. 167-172.
[1224] It was soon afterward reprinted in London and in Paris.
[1225] Cf. the collation of criticisms on the Mexico, given by Allibone in his Dictionary of Authors, and by Poole in his Index to Periodical Literature. Archbishop Spalding, in his Miscellanea, chapters xiii. and xiv., gives the Catholic view of his labors; and Ticknor, in his Life of Prescott, prints various letters from Hallam, Sismondi, and others, giving their prompt expressions regarding the book. In chapters xiii., xiv., and xv. of this book the reader may trace Prescott through the progress of the work, not so satisfactorily as one might wish however, for in his diaries and letters the historian failed often to give the engaging qualities of his own character. It is said that Carlyle, when applied to for letters of Prescott which might be used by Ticknor in his Life of the historian, somewhat rudely replied that he had never received any from Prescott worth preserving. Prescott’s library is, unfortunately, scattered. He gave some part of it to Harvard College, including such manuscripts as he had used in his Ferdinand and Isabella; and some years after his death a large part of it was sold at public auction. It was then found that, with a freedom which caused some observation, the marks of his ownership had been removed from his books. Many of his manuscripts and his noctograph were then sold, perhaps through inadvertence, for the family subsequently reclaimed what they could. The noctograph and some of the manuscripts are now in the cabinet of the Massachusetts Historical Society (cf. Proceedings, vol. xiii. p. 66), and other manuscripts are in the Boston Public Library (Bulletin of Boston Public Library, iv. 122). A long letter to Dr. George E. Ellis, written in 1857, and describing his use of the noctograph, is in the same volume (Proceedings, vol. xiii. p. 246). The estimate in which Prescott was held by his associates of that Society may be seen in the records of the meeting at which his death was commemorated, in 1859 (Proceedings, iv. 167, 266). There is a eulogy of Prescott by George Bancroft in the Historical Magazine, iii. 69. Cf. references in Poole’s Index, p. 1047.
[1226] Philadelphia and London, 1859.
[1227] This correspondence was civil, to say the least. Bancroft (Mexico, i. 205), with a rudeness of his own, calls Wilson “a fool and a knave.”
[1228] American Ethnological Society Transactions, vol. i.